"Ah, that's unfortunate then," Daniels says, leaving it ambiguous as to what part of her answer he's referring to. "I'll find a way to address it in the future, I think."
He then motions to his juggler friend and says, "Dan says that surely the captain wouldn't be offended by a display of great skill which he could easily say was held in his honor."
He could indeed say that, Two Shores agrees, but this is a fairly transparent attempt at concealing his true motive - Dan acts according to precepts that you have set down, good sir, and when he displays skill, he displays it to impress you specifically and to earn your approval. The captain's opinion is wholly incidental, as you could no doubt order Dan to slay the captain and devour his flesh, and Dan would doubtlessly give it his best effort. You are Dan's owner in a way none other could be.
Dan clicks back a little halfheartedly that this does sound like a fairly intriguing concept - the devouring part, mind you. The captain seems to have a surplus of unusual flesh. There is a great deal about self-sustainability he could learn from someone with meat like that on him.
In any case, Shores shakes her head, it does no one any good to be grim about things. The captain will settle down at some point, even if you can expect him to challenge you at a later point - but she would advise you to cave at this point, for she has never seen someone successfully live through genuinely trying his patience twice.
In the meantime, would you like to meet with her in the morning? She feels she could teach you a fair deal about putting your unusual skills to more efficient use, if you can stand to bring them to bear against her sword. The journey westward should take a few days, which ought to leave plenty of time for practice, particularly if the good captain continues to sulk for the next few days.
"Right, coming!" The alarm bells continued to fail to ring in Thomas's ears.
Go looking. Perhaps keep a hand on the rope, or an eye on the exit, or some such.
[Reaching In The Dark: 3]
You do keep a hand on the rope - keeping an eye on the exit is sadly an ineffectual practice, as you've lost sight of it almost immediately. Gamble's light grows dimmer and dimmer, and eventually all you can do is follow the voice in the dark, this woman's voice that you came in here for. You need to remind yourself this every now and then as things become fuzzier as you go on.
When you reach something resembling a hole, but honestly quite ineffable in shape, even the rope in your hand feels ephemeral, halfway a product of the imagination in this strange senseless void you're walking into. Nevertheless, the voice is still urging you on - you're here! Come on now, stop being an idjit and give her your hand! Get her out of here!
You start to reach your hand forward, and it immediately goes to sleep as you plunge it into an abstraction of liquid helium, a physical oddity that your mind does not entirely comprehend and that, indeed, seems almost actively hazardous to your attempts to understand it. You try to think, but it gets altogether too difficult to think of anything other than putting your hand forth and grabbing at the woman's hand - so this is what you do, for lack of an obvious alternative.
Except when you pull, the weight of whatever it is you actually grabbed and even its shape feel profoundly wrong. Your thoughts tell you to stop, but are cut off, strangled by an unknown force. You continue to pull at it, and you realize that what you were pulling was not a hand at all - rather, it was a thread. And appropriately enough this is when things begin to unravel.
The darkness parts, revealing that it was but a thin film formed over something deeper and more frightening still, a black hole that hungers not for mere light or matter, but things far more insidious and complex. You stand on the threshold of a monstrous, alien presence, and it reaches out to you like an old friend that you've never met, overflowing with freshly harvested warmth in the freezing chill.
Welcome. It has been some time. Your contribution of a source entitles you to three questions answered, and one wish fulfilled (see: reward schemes, first-time bonuses, relative value of sources).
"Well, I guess we're dealing with this situation whether we want to or not. Stay on your toes."
I step toward the tree to observe this eye more closely, trying to discern its purpose. I also keep an eye on the cat creatures, watching for any signs of aggresssion.
[The Depths of Despair: 3]
You stare the eye down and get closer to the tree. This appears to be enough to get its interest in a more direct way, and at a certain distance the eaters in their nests start to stand up and curve their backs in catlike postures, raising their hackles and making diseased growls reminiscent of dogs with severe bronchitis. They quiet down slightly when the central eye looks straight at you and leans forward, out of the hollow.
Whereas the other creatures are broadly catlike, the thing that leans out of the tree seems like a gruesome parody of all of them, one that appears to have grown beyond all reason and lost its bones, its many limbs resembling furry, hooked tentacles that wind along the side of the hollow as what used to be its head leans forward, its eyes seemingly merged into a single, polycoric whole that's grown large enough to retreat down through a dissolved palate, giving its face the appearance of a single, dominant eye with jaws for eyelids and teeth for eyelashes.
Closer up, its question seems clearer - what do you want, trespasser? Why do you interfere? And what is required to force you to leave? While they do not appear to exactly know what you are, their instincts clearly and accurately mark you and your associates as a danger of some kind, and an unanticipated one at that.
"That sounds just fine, actually; I'm not in a rush."
Story time it is, then.
After a perhaps underwhelming session of work Lady Craik is more than happy to settle down for another round of tea, this time in a slightly different parlor than before. Queen Makala's Land is a favorite topic of hers - she studied there a while,
hic, did you know?
In any case, the story of Queen Makala's Land is one of perseverance in the face of entropy! Once a beautiful,
hurk, an absolutely beautiful garden nation, a rival to the wondrous land of El itself! A place of freedom and expression and poetry and, Lady Craik starts to gesture wildly, fingers creaking and locking into strange positions, yep, all of that good stuff and,
hic, all of it built through a solid command of the arts of science! They could do from mere principles what the alchemists do through,
hic, cheating of the very worst kind. Truth and beauty, that was the nature of Queen Makala's Land.
But then, Lady Craik hangs her head theatrically, her vertebrae poking into the thin worn skin of her neck, then their time was,
hic, it was really quite cruelly ended. The stars of the Corner turned against them, untethered something vital, changed the most important underpinnings of something - that's what,
hurk, that's what time-enders do, you know. They change things up, break them, ruin all things they touch. They made the shining sea the same as they ruined old deathless Queen Makala. And that's when the ice came and covered all. Glaciers slid down from above and grew overnight, and the sun shone no longer upon the land. Their luscious farms died and men froze in their farms. The earth became hungry and ate the great universities, sealing them into the depths of the miles upon miles of glaciation...!
Such a tragic,
hic, (pardon her language) bloody tragic loss to the art of science was Queen Makala's Land. Not that all was lost, mind you. There's marvelous things you can do with all the things that got trapped in the ice. The universities in particular, they were not so much buried as they were... encysted, so to speak! Which, when combined with the creativity of its inhabitants, let them put their,
hic, not inconsiderable talents (if you'll permit her to toot her own horn) to the topic of survival and preservation! Pressure and ice applied so quickly gave rise to fascinating minerals, and the friction of the disaster that caused it, well, that gave rise to its own,
hurk, its own milieu of peculiar materials. It took scarcely a century or three, in fact, before the universities, the three or so that persevered in their own way, to excavate a way upward among the shifting glaciers.
Of course, that last part is,
hic, secondhand knowledge. Lady Craik herself did not live to see this happen, but from what she hears among the fresher dead, before they invariably go, the Makalan spirit still lives on today, in a place too cold for even the Wicked King to dare pull into his influence, lit by gas flame and powered by ingenuity. Oh, Lady Craik says as she weeps a single thick tear from her left eye, would that she could see it now! Those shining domes,
hic, those caves of ice!
You see her looking out into the distance, what you believe to be far eastward - she is wondering, and still lightly weeping at the thought of her homeland.
Leif Erikson, Miner and Lush
- The Mind, It Goes A-Wandering: 2
- Sealed alchemist's brass box
- Half-basket of apple-like mushrooms (hallucinogenic)
- Paper party crown (worn)
- Moth-robe (worn)
- Itchy Woolen Britches (worn)
- Moth Elder's prized pigsticker
- A Word: INEVITABLE
- A Word: APOCALYPSE
- A Word: DRINK
- Body Count: 228
- Mead of Poetry (2 shining revelations remaining)
- Enders' Friend: The Grave of Red Clouds Parting
- Inscribed Wooden Stylus
- Iron spear
- 0.03 gp
- The Box: ?
- Induced Lucidity: Jehwlheimr, The Land The Gods Remember
- Compatibility: Minding
- Tricks of the Mind: Perception, Memory
- Tricks of the Mind: Engagement, Negation, Abstraction, Prestige
- Tricks of the Mind: the Self, the Other
- Tricks of the Mind: the Mythscape
- Gods of the Underground: Did You Just What
- A Visit From The Stork: Is What You Yes
- The Voracious Dark: Two Deals Made
- The Voracious Dark: The Promised Sixth
- Moth's Flight: Honorary Clansman
- A Night That Burns Forever: Juicy Gossip
- The Miracle of Life: Wayward Rabbit
- A Terrifying Deadly Trip: GOTTA MOVE
Eileen Minett, Vinyl Collector
- Distilled alcohol (in flask)
- Spirits of salt (in clay jar)
- Soaps of elk, bear, bat and snake
- 4 flasks of lamp oil
- Oil lamp (lit)
- Linen stoat shirt (worn, plasma-scorched)
- Stoat trousers (worn)
- Comfy slippers (worn)
- Never-made scimitar (blackened, slightly dull)
- Tooth-handled hunting knife
- Black leather boots
- An assemblage of amber and amethysts
- Silver thread-necklace
- Onyx spiral earrings
- 2 oaken rings
- Rusty, bloodstained knife
- A Word: HUNGER
- A Word: SYNTHESIS
- A Weapon: Explosive Cysts
- Grenade Jumping: A Solid Technique
- The Good Doctor: Secret Histories
- Sword of the Sand People: Cleaning Supplies
- Sword of the Sand People: The Services of a Minder
- Higher Tonight: There And Back Again
- The Old Mistress: Like A House On Fire
Jack Daniels, Karate Man
- 1 disabled manikin (immensely grateful)
- Wounds: 1
- Red and gold vest and breeches combo (worn)
- Leather boots (worn)
- Rubber mattress (filled with water)
- 14031 gp (in sack)
- Poor Unfortunate Soul: Forever Captive
- The Queen's Guard: Actual Asset
- Powers of the Beyond: Gardener of Thoughts
- Garden of Thoughts: the Stoat-Magistrate
- Dusty Wooden Speaking-Trumpet
- Crossbow Bolt (in throat)
- A Word: REND
- A Word: SILENCE
- A Word: EXECRABLE
- A Weapon: Murder-Thought
- Uncoupled: Strength
- Wooden Door
- Induced Lucidity: The Silent Garden
- Elongated Affairs: Enemy of the New State
- A Place In History: Vastly Unreliable
- 2 rats, crushed
- 1 rat, strangled
- 1 rat, live
- Doomstones: So High Up But Such A Bitter View
- The Majordomo: A Great Divide Between Us Now
- The Voracious Dark: Decreasing Demand
- The Voracious Dark: More Specific Requests
- The Vault of Heavens: Special Treatment
- Scars of Time: Practiced Acquaintance
- The Night Sky: How Very, Very Quaint
- Petty Crimes: Minded For Safety
- Fires, Pines & Day, Minions At Law: On Retainer
- Body Count: 3
Thomas Minstep, Insurance Agent
- A Word: ABSENCE
- A Word: GOODBYE
- A Word: WORM
- A Weapon: The Sword They Fear
- Insurance contracts, signed in triplicate: 12
- Nobody Cares
- Helen Clampitt
- Lily
- Undine and Prosper Eke
- Silver
- Tabernacle, treefisher scout
- Treefisher elder
- 4 treefishers
- Make A Man Out Of You: Battle-Tested
- The Grip of Tharn: Insurance Against The Storm
- Ranging fork
- 2 feet of sinew-thread
- Tooth-needle
- A Bowl, Black and Knobby
- Tight Leather Pants (worn)
- Incredibly Tight Blue Dress (worn, mutilated, mildly provocative)
- The Queen's Guard: A Reward Well Earned
- The New Queen: Lasting Gratitude
- The Box: Absolutely Delightful
- The Voracious Dark: The Place of Lost Souls
- Body Count: 12
Oscar Wilde, Chemistry Teacher
- A Word: REVELATION
- The Wicked King's Missive On Economic Reform (in massive silver scroll case)
- Traces of Mischief: Glowing Facial Rift
- The Serpent's Egg: Dissemination
- Body Count: 4
- Cornerstone Helm (worn, collecting light)
- Bottle of aspirin
- Time-ender's measure (wrapped, processing? stopping?)
- 10 m of rope
- Half a candle
- 1 rat, skinless and smoked
- 6 gp
- Lock of Hair (unidentified)
- Iron nail, unused
- An Inauspicious Key
- Burlap Foot Wrappings (worn)
- Burlap Hand Wrappings (worn)
- Moth-Eaten Hat (worn)
- Respectable Brown Skirt (worn)
- Old Brown Waistcoat (worn)
- Bright Yellow Tunic (worn)
- A Wealth of Burlap Ribbons
- The Winding Path of Inspiration: The Less Dangerous Friend
- The King's Court: The Greatest Gift of All
- The King's Court: The North Wind's Gift
- The King's Court: Makala's Old Glory
- The King's Court: The South Wind's Gift
- The King's Court: The West Wind's Gift
- The King's Court: A Gift For The Wicked King
- Wizzards Bargins: A Spool of Copper Wire
- Wizzards Bargins: A Roll of Your Finest Sticky Tape
- Wizzards Bargins: A Hunk of Exquisite Graphite
- In High Spirits: But Not Very Useful In The Lab